nationalism

nationalism has provided the central theme of much Irish historical writing. Yet the point at which its Irish history begins continues to be debated. The issue can in part be resolved by distinguishing between national consciousness, an awareness of belonging to one nationality rather than another, and nationalism, a political philosophy and programme for action built round the proposition that national consciousness finds its only proper expression in the achievement of a nation state. In Ireland the sense of a single people, united by a common language and legal code (see brehon law), and with well‐developed origin myths (see milesians), is evident from an early period, although the relationship between such ideas and the sporadic attempts from the 9th century to establish political unity under a high kingship continues to be debated. It is also necessary to distinguish between nationalism and the sort of movements for the defence of local, sectional, or corporate liberties that were characteristic of the multiple kingdoms and overlapping jurisdictions of late medieval and early modern Europe. Examples of the latter would include episodes like the resistance to the Acts of Resumption and the parliamentary declaration of 1460; these testified to the emergence among the English of Ireland of a distinct identity, but one that did not extend beyond their own ethnic and cultural group.

A further element in what can be considered the prehistory of Irish nationalism was provided by the notion of patria or fatherland, developed from the early 16th century by commonwealth reformers within the Pale. The same concept, linked to a militant Counter‐Reformation Catholicism, was deployed in the revolts of James Fitzmaurice FitzGerald and Hugh O'Neill. In the 1640s the alliance forced on Old English and Gaelic Irish by the hostility of the Protestant state provided the background to a new assertion of Irish national rights by Patrick Darcy and others. Yet the bond between the Confederate Catholics was based above all on religion, while their political self‐definition was built around their loyalty to the crown. In the same way Jacobitism, the main political allegiance of Irish Catholics for two generations after the Glorious Revolution, was undoubtedly a vehicle for the indirect expression of a sense of religious and (for some) ethnic separateness. But it was also a British ideology, founded on the assumption of a continued link between Ireland and Great Britain. The Protestant patriots of the 18th century developed a more explicit defence of Irish constitutional rights. Yet their sense of Irishness remained intriguingly ambivalent, looking forward in some of its rhetoric and symbolism to the concerns of modern nationalism, yet looking back, in its social and religious exclusiveness, to earlier defences of sectional liberties.

As a mass movement Irish nationalism can be traced to the 1790s, when the strong sense of lost ancestral rights inherited from Gaelic tradition by the Defenders fused with the broader vocabulary of popular and national rights derived from the American Revolution and French Revolution by the United Irishmen. The durability of the popular consciousness thus created is confirmed in the persistence of the Ribbon tradition. Revolutionary nationalism was revived half‐heartedly by Young Ireland in 1848, and more purposefully by the Fenians. O'Connell's repeal movement made popular nationalism a powerful electoral force. Yet later attempts to revive a separate Irish parliamentary identity, independent opposition and the National Association, were less successful, and there remained at least the possibility, in the prosperous and relatively tranquil 1850s and 1860s, that the ethnic distinctiveness, social conflicts, and denominational rivalries of Ireland, like those of Wales and Scotland, might be integrated into the broad‐based alliances constituted by the main British political parties, Liberal and Conservative. It was not until the 1880s, and Parnell's achievement in transforming the home rule party into a disciplined parliamentary grouping with a well‐organized popular base, that Irish politics became polarized round the dichotomy of nationalist and unionist.

Irish nationalism differed from most continental European nationalisms in not having a strong basis in language or culture. From the United Irishmen to the Fenians, organized nationalist politics were consistently stronger in the commercialized and Anglicized south and east than in the Gaelic west, and offered no consistent challenge to the progressive Anglicization of Irish society. The greatest interpreters of Gaelic tradition and Irish history, such as Ferguson, O'Grady and Lecky, were unionist in their politics. It was not until the very end of the 19th century that political nationalism came to be associated with cultural revivalism. However, the importance then achieved by movements like the Gaelic Athletic Association and the Gaelic League ensured that a commitment to cultural revival became a central element in nationalist ideology.

Nineteenth‐century Irish nationalists emphasized the perceived contrast between the prosperity enjoyed under Grattan's parliament and the economic decline that followed the Act of Union, presenting self‐government as the key to economic regeneration. Yet nationalism, in Ireland as elsewhere, was a cross‐class alliance, avoiding identification with specific economic interests. Parnell was briefly able to link the cause of home rule, in both practical and rhetorical terms, with that of the tenant farmer (see land war). Once the Land Acts had transferred ownership from a small, isolated Protestant elite to a large class of medium and small farmers, however, proposals for further social and economic change threatened to divide rather than unite the nationalist population. The democratic programme of the first Dáil offered vague promises of a more equal society. But land seizures and workers' soviets during the Anglo‐Irish war and after were repudiated, and in some cases forcibly suppressed, by nationalist leaders anxious both to assert the primacy of the national issue and to avoid antagonizing vested interests within Irish society. Later attempts to give militant nationalism a social base, in Saor Eire and Republican Congress, were short‐lived and unsuccessful.

If nationalism muffled class differences, it exacerbated religious ones. The defence of Irish constitutional rights in the 18th century, up to and including resistance to the Act of Union, had come almost entirely from the Protestant middle and upper classes. Already by the 1830s, however, the great majority of Protestants had come to see the Union as their only defence against a politicized and increasingly threatening Catholic majority. Instead support for the repeal movement came overwhelmingly from Catholics, reacting to economic decline and failure to make good promises of rapid progress towards religious equality. Across the 19th century, concessions to Catholic education, and a more even‐handed approach to official appointments, progressively widened the circle of Catholic opportunity. But progress was gradual and constantly lagged behind rising Catholic expectations. A minority tradition of Protestant nationalism survived in Young Ireland, and later in the home rule movement. But constitutional nationalist movements, from repeal to the Irish parliamentary party, were to enjoy a close working partnership with the Catholic church, and Catholicism was to remain a central, if rarely acknowledged, element in the imagined community of the Irish nation.

Bibliography

Boyce, D. G. , Nationalism in Ireland (2nd edn., 1991)
Garvin, T. , Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland 1858–1928 (1987)